Connections, Conversations, Serendipity, and Shit

David Weinberger describes, in his discussion of hyperlinks, connections that can serve to reconfigure the entire (business) world. But do these connections actually reduce the distance between people, enabling better and more human conversations? Or do they serve to more distinctly define our place as nodes in networks?

He says that within pyramidal structures we are strictly defined. But it would seem that even in the decentralized power structure the web provides, we are still just as (if not more) defined than ever before - this definition is simply disguised as something we have written ourselves. We believe these new definitions to be our very essence, that the web captures something not previously able to be tamed. Weinberger obviously believes this makes us more free, but we are still defined - instead of a hierarchical definition of where we fit into a power structure, we have a definition bounded by hyperlinks.

Weinberger also talks about the freedom of movement on the web, saying, "If you want to go to a page, you just click on the link and, boom, you're there. (The fact that this might have required, beneath the surface, thirty 'hops' among servers in places you've never heard of is completely irrelevant. You don't see the hops; you just see the page)." But if we remember the digital enclosure, then we know that these thirty hops are not "completely irrelevant." Even if we don't see them, those other thirty servers do see them - and it makes their definition of us ever clearer.

Finally, Weinberger also introduces a concept we saw in Wark's Gamer Theory. "The Web isn't primarily a medium for information, marketing, or sales. It's a world in which people meet, talk, build, fight, love, and play," Weinberger says. He goes on to note that "without play, only Shit Happens. With play, Serendipity Happens." Play, however, is spontaneous. It cannot be given to us - in Wark's terms, it would seem that only a designer can truly play. If this is true, then Weinberger is probably right, and play would be good for a business. The problem, however, is that neither the pyramidal structure he derides nor the decentralized hyperlinked one he promotes actually provide much of a space for play.

Networked Desire

As I sat in Geneva Foreign and Sports this morning waiting for the estimate on my car, I tried pulling a few things on networks and online marketing together to distract myself and pass the time. In emotional branding, Marc Gobe notes that "it is the emotional aspect of products and their distribution systems that will be the key difference between consumers' ultimate choice and the price that they will pay." But how do networks (on which the emotional aspects of products are sold, and of which the distribution systems themselves are made) utilize this emotional aspect?

Making this question even more enigmatic is the viewpoint of Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, summarized in a question they pose toward the start of The Exploit: A Theory of Networks: "Is there a 'nonhuman' or an 'unhuman' understanding of networks that would challenge us to rethink the theory and practice of networks?" Their goal is to "seek a means of comprehending networks as simultaneously material and immaterial, as simultaneously technical and political, as simultaneously misanthropic and all-too-human."

How do these contradictions become reconciled? What is it about online marketing and networks themselves that allows for an imposition of a human quality while still remaining entirely inhuman? Which do we notice more - the human or the inhuman? Why? And why do we respond in such an enthusiastic manner?

Questions, I suppose, that I will have to settle for myself over Thanksgiving. So much for relaxation.

Taking Back Play

"Sure, reality TV doesn't look like reality, but then neither does reality. Both look like games." So says McKenzie Wark in the book Gamer Theory. The idea is that play was once radical, an option outside of mundane daily work and routines. Today something very different has happened: "While the counter-culture wanted worlds of play outside the game, the military entertainment complex countered in turn by expanding the game to the whole world, containing play forever within it," Wark says.

Within this game, different rules apply than the rules within the world previous to its transformation into gamespace. Here we have "latent destiny - the virtue of right through rule." Likewise, Wark says, "all that is righteous wins; all that wins is righteous." In this context, play is no longer play. Playing is simply a method used to win the game - "it is work, it is serious; it is morality, it is necessity."

So - what's left to do? Take play back. Wark writes that "with the triumph of gamespace, what the gamer as theorist needs is to reconstruct the deleted files on those who thought pure play could be a radical option, who opposed gamespace with their revolutionary playdates." While the military entertainment complex - which took part in constituting this gamespace as reality - would like us to think that gamespace is just as clean and well-ruled as games themselves, this is just a means of control. The way out, as Wark points out, is to "take the blue pill." In other words, "Play within the game, but against gamespace. Be ludic, but also lucid."

Tactical Media, but Whose Tactics?

Axel Bruns argues that citizen journalism (or tactical media) holds a new and important place in the mediasphere, opening up a space for discussion with traditional mainstream media. He says blogs and other forms of this tactical media "have added a second tier of news media that comments on, critiques, and regularly corrects the mainstream news . . ." This has led to journalism as a conversation, rather than as a lecture, Bruns says.

However, he discounts political antagonisms as holding any place in this new form of journalism: "a true 'rule of the people' can only be established through productive debate and deliberation; it cannot be reached through entrenched political antagonism," Bruns writes. Are productive debate and deliberation not precisely a product of antagonism, though? Bruns pinpoints it himself, albeit unknowingly, when he says "sites which do little more than publish content are in danger of becoming mere PR tools for oppositional groups, simply containing press releases for the latest cause."

Bruns also misses a crucial element of this conversation. While he does say that "each time news bloggers and other citizen journalists point to omissions, misrepresentations, or biases in the mainstream media content by contrasting news stories, press releases, and other background information, they use the news media's own tools and resources against it." On the other side of this, however, is that mainstream media sources are also quite adept at taking tactical media stories and recontextualizing them to fit the way that traditional media is covering any given story.

So, while Bruns contends (and he quotes Douglas Rushkoff here) that "'we are heading not towards a toppling of the democratic, parliamentary or legislative processes, but towards their reinvention in a new, participatory context,'" I would ask how this is possible without antagonism. It seems to me that without antagonism, we wind up with simple echo chambers in which no real change occurs.

Election Day

The New York Times website has an interactive page up today asking users to choose one word to describe their state of mind today - November 4th, 2008 - election day. It has a scrolling word page where you see the words picked move across the page (and you can even pick whose supporters' minds you want to read).

The Numerati

Rob Walker has a review of "The Numerati" in the New York Times today - They've Got Your Number: Baker, a writer for BusinessWeek, categorizes the categorizers into seven chapters: some number crunchers seek to decode us as shoppers, others as voters or patients or even potential terrorists. In all cases, the idea is to gather data, use computers to compile and interpret it, and draw conclusions about how we will behave — or how we might be persuaded to behave. “We turn you into math,” one of his subjects declares. Sometimes the data comes from firms that collect it from public records or subscription lists, or that conduct exhaustive attitudinal surveys, concluding on the basis of whether you own cats or subscribe to gourmet magazines which political “tribe” you belong to, and thus how a campaign should approach you (or not). But the most interesting information comes from us, particularly by way of our online activities. Baker’s savants monitor our collective (if anonymous) Web surfing patterns for “behavioral clues” that, for example, help advertisers decide when to hit us with what pitch.

Technological Fetishism and Online Democracy

Professor Dean writes in the Digital Media and Democracy book that we now have a system of communicative capitalism. She says that instead of being heard, messages are "circulated, reduced to the medium." This reduction results in part from a technological fetishism. We believe that now, more than ever, technology and online contribution equate to democracy and democratic values. Part of this is something (which she mentions in the article and I've mentioned in a previous post) that Slavoj Zizek calls interpassivity. We allow the technological object to act (democratically) for us, and while we feel that we've "done our part," no change actually occurs.

This is backed up, in part, by Clay Shirky's essay, "Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality." In it he says that only a few blogs today are read widely, while a huge number fly under the radar and are rarely visited, regardless of whether or not they have a valuable contribution to make to any number of discussions.

Professor Dean says that "to ontologize the political is to collapse the very symbolic space necessary for politicization, a space between an object and its representation, its ability to stand for something other than itself." This destruction of the symbolic removes real hope for political action online, and is simultaneously happening in other regions of our society as well. In the consumer realm, the symbolic has all but disappeared - instead of actual political action, we buy "fair trade" coffee and invest in products which are political for us. Likewise, "by sending an email, signing a petition, responding to an article on a blog, people can feel political."

All hope is not lost, however. While thought like this seems to indicate that any entry onto the web should come with the disclaimer "abandon all hope, etc etc," it does not mean that things cannot change. If we can stop the fetish surrounding technology and break away from the idea that passively "acting" online is akin to political action, then real political action becomes a reality once again. As Professor Dean puts it, "politics in the sense of working to change current conditions may well require breaking with and through the fantasies attaching us to communicative capitalism."

The Campaign Game

In Gamer Theory, McKenzie Wark writes that "The era of the great openly declared villains is over. In topological times, the bad guys pass as normal or they corrupt the law." For one reason or another (I'll let you decide how it happened), this reminded me of the current presidential race. Each candidate is saying two things - one, the other candidate is a "good man," and two, the other candidate is friends with terrorists, misguided in all of his policies and essentially evil.

The forum, at least when they are face to face, is more like a game show than anything else. As Wark says, "The key genres for working out the subsumption of the topographic into the topological are the situation comedy and the game show. On a game show, anyone can be taken out of everyday life and brought into the magic circle of television . . ."

On an unrelated note, Wark also writes: "The romance of the outsider is dead." Obama has left his image of being an outsider behind - mainly because it was never true, but partially, it would seem, because that image was not benefitting him. McCain and Palin still trumpet the word maverick all over the press and the debates, but it clearly has not helped if the polls are to be believed.

"You can change the form of Government but there's not much you can do to change the underlying form of production," Wark says. McCain and Obama can talk about change all they want, but neither of them is talking about fundamental change. Neither is even talking about changing the form of government. They want to "eliminate corruption" and all that jazz - but as long as gamespace is structured by algorithms and allegorithms, corruption is just another algorithm politicians will figure out and utilize in order to win the game.

Enjoy Yourself. Categorically.

I've been formulating an idea in my head for the past couple days, and I suppose there's no better time to let it air out online than at 1:45 in the morning.

Andrejevic introduced us to the idea of the digital enclosure and drew a parallel to the land enclosure movement forming the basis of capitalism. Just as the land enclosure movement (the creation of private property) led to the development of distinct classes, so the digital enclosure leads to a distinct separation between prosumers and the state/corporations.

Todd McGowan, in The End of Dissatisfaction?, posits another monumental transformation of society. It is, he says, "the transformation from a society founded on the prohibition of enjoyment (and thus the dissatisfaction of its subjects) to a society that commands enjoyment or jouissance (in which there seems to be no requisite dissatisfaction)." One of the authors (I'm not sure which, at the moment) in Rebooting Democracy wrote that millenials have an individual sense of self-purpose, but no sense of collective duty. What if, on the other hand, "the only duty seems to consist in enjoying oneself as much as possible.?" McGowan believes this is true, and it begs the question: is the only maxim that we can will to be universally applicable, simply put: enjoy yourself? If, as Kant believed, morality rests on the categorical imperative, what does that say about the morality of the millenials?

Enjoyment is particularly individual. If the digital enclosure creates a new kind of class antagonisms, and the latest generation is too involved in enjoying themselves to notice, what does that mean for the future of civil society?

Deliberation or De-Liberation?

There is a certain sense of optimism permeating the readings for today in Rebooting Democracy. Much the literature is concerned with how to make the internet, blogs and "echo chambers" work in such a way to increase the democratic potential of the medium.

I hesitate to be so optimistic, however. The democratic potential of the internet is there, to be sure, but it rests on control being in the hands of the people. So far, that has not been the case. While D. Travers Scott, in "Tempests of the Blogosphere," from Digital Media and Democracy says that blogflops can be attributed to a lack of a sense of storytelling, is that really all there is at play? He says that "Communicative agency, expanded through technology, allows more individuals to better join the mediated public sphere and thereby participate in civic deliberation." The question, then, becomes how to define deliberation.

While David Weinberger, in "Echo Chambers = Democracy," says that echo chambers actually increase deliberation and reasoned discussion, Scott notes that "participation in the mere proliferation of messages is by no means necessarily engaging others in antagonistic, productive, political debate." It may be true that most people will not put their ethics aside to sit down and have a reasoned conversation with those who hold diametrically opposed viewpoints, this does not mean that the answer is to continue this trend online. Perhaps the answer, instead, is to encourage exactly the kind of reasoned discussion that Weinberger discounts as unrealistic. If we believe that our representative democracy works because of deliberation, it makes very little sense to say that real deliberation is impractical.

The liberation of online discussion and the "freedom" it offers - is this real or perceived? Are we simply substituting passive participation online for actual participation in politics? Is our liberty to have a hand in how our government works gaining ground - or is the ground itself crumbling?

Bourgeois Apathy

Felix Stalder, in Bourgeois Anarchism, says that it is cheaper and easier than ever to communicate across time and space with individuals and groups. Every step of this communication is carried out by algorithms that create and store a record of it - what Andrejevic termed the digital enclosure. One of the dangers inherent with this is that it vastly increases the surveillance capacities of large (and, I would add, small) organizations such as the state or private corporations that bid on surveillance work.

Freedom-oriented groups in the '60s provided an "artistic critique" of capitalism, says Stalder, but this was co-opted into the current "creative industry" - anyone can be an artist online. It has lost it's revolutionary edge to the point that it is barely recognized that it ever had one.

In much the same way, small networked organizations have arisen today and have the ability, in Stalder's view, to challenge the state. Although he does talk about the privatization of security and surveillance, Stalder fails to see how even these small organizations can be co-opted to prevent any potential for real change. He even goes so far as to say that the "liberal democracy" we have and its civil society, is being weakened by these small groups. What he doesn't say is how this is not a threat to the state - but a means to the end we've been on the road to since at least the Great Depression, the New Deal and the massive expansion of executive power that came with it.

Interpassivity

Andrejevic writes, in Chapter 7 "iPolitics," that "interactive networked technologies come with a built in, passive information-gathering capacity that promises broader coverage and decreased audience awareness of monitoring practice." He goes on to say that it is passive because it happens, for the most part, as a "by-product of using the technology itself." It is, he notes, what Slavoj Zizek has called "interpassivity." This is a concept from Zizek's book, The Plague of Fantasies. Zizek writes that "it is commonplace to emphasize how, with the new electronic media, the passive consumption of a text or a work of art is over: I no longer merely stare at the screen, I increasingly interact with it, entering into a dialogic relationship with it . . ." This, in and of itself, is not all that bad. Dialogue, even of a passive kind, is encouraged. One of the dangers, as Zizek says, is the interpassivity of real world suffering. Although he doesn't make this specific connection, I am tempted to say that increasing interpassivity online will enable us to deal with interpassivity (of all kinds) in the real world more easily.

Interpassivity supposedly allows for us to have passive satisfaction, "so that it is the object itself which 'enjoys the show' instead of me . . ." This, then allows us "to propose the notion of false activity: you think you are active, while your true position, as embodied in the fetish, is passive . . ." Want to be involved? Join a group on Facebook. Think you need to be more active in politics? Be a fan of a politician online. Meanwhile, we can believe that this fulfills some sort of civic duty even though it is an entirely passive enjoyment of the activity of the object. As an added bonus, anyone who happens to look through our information can now see - my political beliefs are such and such, my religious beliefs are - , my musical tastes are - , and this is how i conceptualize myself. The potential for exploitation is massive, all while we believe we are "having our say."

1984 Revisited

I was more than a little surprised on Tuesday at just how many people had little or no problem with being monitored - constantly. At this particular moment in time, sure, the government and/or corporations may not be doing anything wrong with your information. But is it really so difficult to see the potential for misuse of said data? We might think that we have a say, for now, in how government works, but can we not imagine a time when that might not be so (I'm not so sure we have any say in how it's run now, but that, as they say, is another can of gigabytes)?

Needless to say, I have my doubts about the good graces of the faces at the top. Furthermore, being watched unceasingly might be efficient, I'll give you that. But would you rather have a state run in the interest of efficiency, or in the interest of humanity? I assume most of us have read, or at the very least have a notion of, 1984 by George Orwell. If not, it is the story of a dystopia run with the utmost - you guessed it - efficiency. But the efficiency we believe can be reached through surveillance doesn't include a notion of freedom. If they take away our agency - what next? A lost agency is a lost identity. Maybe it would be efficient, and maybe crime would disappear, and maybe no one would have to die pointless deaths - but we would all lead pointless lives.

Audience Labor and Alienation

In iSPY: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era, Mark Andrejevic introduces the idea of the digital enclosure, which he says is the "creation of an interactive realm wherein every action and transaction generates information about itself." He connects this term to the land enclosure movement that took place with the move from feudalism to capitalism - which is to say, he connects it to the creation of private property which communist theories have so derided. This is because, as Andrejevic notes, "the enclosure movement leads to the formation of distinct classes: those who own the means of production and those who must sell their labor for access to these means . . ."

This idea has led some critical theorists, writes Andrejevic, to assert that "watching advertising might be considered a form of audience labor - value-generating work that is compensated for by access to "free" program content." He describes two forms of consumer labor, that of the work of watching as well as the work of being watched. The language he uses is also markedly Marxist, as he writes about an "ongoing struggle" and the efficiency of work done by "consumers" - the new proletariat.

This can, in my view, further exacerbate the alienation and tensions that Marx was so concerned with. Marx attributed this alienation to both the fact that the laborer saw extremely little money for his/her labor as well as the absence of the enjoyment gleaned from making use of the product. In the case of consumer labor, not only do we not see any money from this labor, but we actually pay the companies to engage in this interactivity. The product - the gained information about our preferences - is one we are similarly distanced from. It seems to me, then, that this is not an increasing "democraticization" of the process of production, but is instead a form of increasing the alienation and subjugation of the consumer-proletariat by the corporations at the top of the capitalist hierarchy.

Facebook Politics

For people interested in the current campaign, there was an article in the New York Times today: Facebook Politics. The author talks mostly about McCain's facebook profile, but ends with some interesting questions.

Coalition of the Willing

I know that Inconvenience is conveniently interested in the implications of the online world to political theory, philosophy and the such. I'm wondering if anyone else is interested in this, and if they'd like to form some kind of coalition to pursue it. Concepts of privacy, surveillance, marketing and online ethics play into this as well, so anyone concerned with those topics could join in too . . . as long as you're not put off by abstractions and the late-night brainstorming sessions I'm so fond of.

I blog, therefore I

The blog platform (and, for that matter, the structure of the web itself) allows for a certain amount of freedom, both for the blogger and the reader(s). The question becomes how much freedom particular bloggers or websites want to allow.

I wonder if Mill's concept of freedom of speech/the press still holds in an arena like the internet. He was a proponent of allowing all in a society to express their ideas, no matter how extreme or deviant. Mill believed that only when all ideas were out in the open could the truth of each be tested against the others, making space for the "best" of them to wade their way through criticism and emerge victorious (best for whom, is what I want to know). Anyway, Mill preceded blogs by a pretty substantial period of time, so I digress . . .

In a New York Times article The Trolls Among Us, Mattathias Schwartz writes, "Today the Internet . . . is a mass medium for defining who we are to ourselves and others." If this is true, do users get to pick a) who they are defined as and b) who they are defined to? The first questions seems like the answer should be painfully obvious: you are who you define yourself as. In a space full of "trolls," however, this truth becomes less absolute. Instead, there is the possibility that I could be defined by anonymous strangers/hackers who may or may not have the same sense of ethics and morals I do. I could, of course, block them from viewing my blog/Facebook/whatever - as Professor Dean says she did to Bill White (Bad Subjects: Blogging Theory), but this is literally no obstacle when all a troll has to do is create another identity (or several more, you know, just in case) to continue harassing whomever they please.

The second question has no obvious answer, and is even more unsettling because of this. In the age of the Internet, we have little to no control over who can see our information - or how it is used. Some may be as harmless as marketers who simply want to know what we like, so that they can better shape products to our preferences (or shape our preferences to their products - I often wonder how much of this already happens on the Internet, which is to say, how many pop-ups, flashy banner ads and corporate websites have I seen, and what part they have played in the creation of my online consumer-persona). On the other hand, how would we feel about the government having complete access to all of our most personal information hidden away in "secret" files on our computers, or being able to keep tabs on every word we write to friends on AIM? If this information is never used, the illusion of privacy persists.

A Quick Recap

On the small group discussion on where this semester might take us:
We began speaking about ethics in the cyber-world, which led us immediately to the idea of how much surveillance is possible when everything occurs in a semi-accessible space (for those who know how to access it, i.e. the state and/hackers). We then thought it might be interesting to look into this concept of surveillance in terms of the legal system - with telecom companies providing data about average citizens to the government, whether or not they can use this information against us in court becomes extremely pertinent. Whether or not it is even legal for the companies to provide this information without violating privacy laws is another question entirely.
Surveillance brought us to yet another topic, that of marketing. When our information is available to be bought and sold by online corporations, it can be used to create profiles of our likes and dislikes - "plugging us in" to the system whether we ask for it or not. This, again, raises the question of who actually has access to this information - and if we really want them to have that ability.

Also, a quick thought on one of the readings for today:
Ong, in "Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought," notes that the "interior transformation of consciousness" occurring through writing is also alienating. It is an alienation from what is immediately natural, which is say, oral communication. I wonder what Marx would have had to say about this, given his preoccupation with the concept of alienation. There is also the possibility that these are two unconnected ideas of alienation, and I'll simply be spending too much time in the near future delineating something that was never there at all.

Body Presence

Faces bring with them a certain amount of expression - and, in doing so, can also cast meaning onto the words being said. Without facial expression/interaction, it would make sense that words themselves would take on more meaning. There is a sense (whether illusory or not), on the other hand, that accountability decreases with the disappearance of facial interactivity. Given this physical disassociation and the diminished sense of accountability, words actually take on more or less meaning depending on the receiver - the reader, the "face" on the other side of the screen.
Richard Rushton, in "What Can a Face Do?" notes that it is intuition which rules the reading of facial expression, not interpretation of "certain preformed codes to the markings one sees expressed on a face . . ."
We could see this, in a way, through the way the first class played out on Tuesday. Although there was, through the projected screen, the "presence" of a professor, there was no physical presence. As such, we lost the ability to intuit what was wanted from us based on body language or facial expressions. We instead had to rely solely on our readings of the words on the screen. That what was taken from this depended on the receiver was immediately obvious - some may have left right away, content with finding out that class was cancelled, some may have waited nervously until the very end, anxious that it may all have been a trick and some would have taken the screen at it's word and followed it to the letter.